Pete Alonso headed to the Orioles after Mets don't make offer, sources say
ORLANDO, Fla. — Pete Alonso spent the first seven seasons of his major-league career in Flushing, became only the second Met to earn Rookie of the Year honors in the last four-plus decades, hit one of the most iconic homers in Mets history, and this season eclipsed Darryl Strawberry’s franchise home run record.
And now, his time etching his name into this team’s lore is over.
Alonso – homegrown Met, fan favorite, and Polar Bear – was finalizing a five-year, $155 million deal with the Orioles Wednesday, a source said. The Mets never made an official offer as it became clear they were not willing to go as high as their competitors, sources confirmed.
Alonso is the third high-profile Met to depart in recent days: Edwin Diaz agreed to terms with the Dodgers Tuesday without approaching the Mets for a counteroffer, a source said, and president of baseball operations David Stearns shipped Brandon Nimmo to the Rangers for Marcus Semien late last month.
Alonso and Nimmo’s departures create a significant offensive gap in Flushing for a team already light on pitching and, last year, defense. Diaz’s exit further shells a bullpen in need of reconstruction. The Mets will also have to find a suitable first-base solution. A platoon of Mark Vientos and Jeff McNeil has been offered as a possibility, and a trade certainly is possible. There are, however, few tantalizing options left in the free agent market, though Cody Bellinger can play both the outfield and first.
Alonso, 31, a five-time All Star, slashed .272/.347/.524 with 38 homers and a team-best 126 RBIs last year; he played all 162 games and led the National League with 41 doubles. One of the most prolific hitters in franchise history, he’s in the top 10 in WAR, slugging percentage, runs, total bases, RBIs and extra-base hits.
After a down year in 2024, Alonso took a team-friendly deal this past offseason, signing for two years and $54 million with a second year player option. Alonso confirmed his intention to opt out immediately after the last game of the year, and implied that he would not bend the way he did last season.
“I loved being a Met,” he said then. “Hopefully, they appreciated me.”
Stearns insisted throughout that the Mets wished to retain Alonso – reiterating that desire as late as Monday, when he spoke at MLB’s winter meetings here. He did add, though, that the Mets had no formal meeting set up with Alonso, who traveled to Orlando to speak with at least the Orioles and Red Sox.
“I think we’ve been pretty clear throughout the process that we’d love to have Pete back,” Stearns said then. “We certainly made that clear to his agent right at the start of free agency. We also respect, just as we respected last year, that this is a process and Pete has earned the right to go through the free agent process, to evaluate the market and we’ll see where that leaves us.”
In his typical pun-filled stylings, Alonso’s agent, Scott Boras, Tuesday said the market for his client was far more robust than it was last year, and that teams would have to pony up.
“The polar vortex of last year has kind of thawed,” he said. “That prior bear market is exhausted, so now we kind of have the running of the bulls.”
He added: “Right-handed power is a commodity. A guy who can play on the dirt is a commodity. Of all the teams we met with, not one doesn’t want Pete to play first base because of his digs and what he does. There’s a lot said of his defense but we’re learning it’s very positive because they don’t have many first basemen who can play every day in the field and carry the offensive thrust of it.”
At the general managers’ meetings last month, Boras also highlighted Alonso’s durability and adaptability.
“The guy is such a worker,” he said. “He made biomechanical adjustments from ’24 to ’25 which proved to be highly rewarding for him. The metrics that most teams look at were grandly improved. He really understands how to consistently take a bat and perform, and I think that’s a credit to him for all of his work in the offseason.”
There were signs the Mets were ready to move on, though – none quite as telling as the comments Stearns made in the immediate aftermath of the 2025 collapse. It was then that he said the team intended to up its focus on “run prevention,” meaning pitching and defense – the latter being the weakness in Alonso’s game, despite Boras' assertions.
With Alonso, Nimmo and Diaz gone, and nearly all of the coaching staff replaced, next year’s team will prove to be very different than the one that preceded. In a bit of foreshadowing, Stearns said he wasn’t quite sure how much value he placed in continuity.
“That is something broadly that we talk about a lot and we have a lot of those conversations,” he said Tuesday. “We’ve had them throughout this offseason. We’ve had them throughout last offseason as well when we were faced with some decisions. It’s part of it. I can’t tell you that I know exactly how to weigh that. I think we do our best to weigh the full impact of any player on our team, on our organization and we make the best decision we can.”
Newsday's David Lennon contributed to this story.
Laura Albanese is the Mets beat writer for Newsday. She's been covering MLB since 2014 after starting at Newsday as an intern seven years earlier.
